The Importance Of Bruce Conner To 20th Century Cinema

In seeking the magic of Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, Robin Scher speaks of Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray as not only shaking “the very bedrock of pop culture” but essentially becoming the first music video through harnessing the full power of rock ‘n roll in support of his imagery.

In the video below, Dennis Hopper, David James, Bruce Jenkins, Michael Kohn, Gerald Casale and others consider the importance of Bruce Conner in 20th century cinema. Dennis Hopper, in fact, calls Bruce Conner the most important artist of the 20th Century. Bruce Jenkins, more fundamentally, says Conner was “first and foremost a visual artist, somebody who was always drawing, who really understood the world through a visual lens [and] understood the power of the scale of cinema.” Michael Kohn sees “a great spirituality” in Conner’s work, a “sense of mysticism [that] is not going to be made clear for you but is going to be made manifest for you through his work.” See the interview and snippets of Conner’s work in the video below: